by Mitch Silver
Now Kaltenbrunner was between them and Amy. “That’s okay. My wife just wanted to get my attention.”
Amy blurted out, “I’m not his wife!” Several nearby passengers turned in their seats to see what was going on.
Kaltenbrunner had reached her row. He jammed himself into the middle seat, locking Amy in. He looked at her as he spoke, but his words were meant for the people watching this little domestic tableau. “You’re right, honey. Two days to go. Prewedding jitters, I guess.” The heads slowly turned back to what they’d been doing, leaving the nice couple behind them to work things out.
Amy gripped her ThinkPad tightly with both hands. If he turned away for a second, she’d crash it down on his head. He put out one meaty arm and laid it over both of hers, preempting her strike.
“Listen, lady—Dr. Greenberg—why’d you pull a stunt like that?”
Amy was still holding the computer so tightly her knuckles were white. “Like what?”
“Like leaving your seat and making me go looking for you.”
“You know perfectly well why.” Amy could hear the fear in her voice. And the defiance. “You’re one of them.”
“No.” He took his arm off hers. “I’m one of us.”
Amy noticed he was breathing hard. From climbing over the seats, or out of anxiety, she couldn’t tell.
He lowered his voice a little. “I sent you that e-mail.” He was smoothing his hair, trying to make himself look more presentable. “So why’d you get on the damn plane?”
Amy tried to keep her voice low like his, but it came out like a croak. “Because I only read it after I got on. Am I really in danger?”
Instead of looking at her, he was looking forward, scanning the heads of the other passengers. “Yes. Really.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
He reached into his jacket pocket and palmed a plastic ID card. He showed it to her. It said “James Sheridan” under his picture. At the top was an official seal of some sort and the words “United States of America.”
“Are you FBI?”
Sheridan pulled a face. “Nah. We’re the other guys.”
“So who is Kaltenbrunner?”
“The man they sent to kill you. The German from your hotel.”
This time the cold shock wave ran down Amy’s body in the reverse direction, from her hair to her feet. “Kill me?”
“That’s why they upgraded you. To put you two together.”
“And he gave you his ticket?”
“I sort of took it. He’s still in the airport men’s room.”
“Is he—”
“Dead? You think I’m an amateur? No, he’s not dead. But he’ll have to wear a neck brace.”
He was still facing forward, so she did too, trying to look for whatever he was looking for. “But why would anyone want to kill me?”
“That book you’re reading. Those papers. They want it.”
“But why? And who’s they?”
Kaltenbrunner/Sheridan turned and looked at her, so she did the same. His face, like his body, was big and tough, but his eyes were kind. “You really don’t know?”
“No, I honestly don’t.”
The next thing he said was “If you want classical music, they have opera favorites on channel nine.”
Amy looked at him, bemused. And then she saw Siobhan Farrell, the flight attendant from the front cabin, coming down the aisle toward them. She had two lunch trays. “Pasta primavera and boeuf tenderloin. We don’t like our business class customers to go hungry.”
Amy was not in the least bit hungry, but she dutifully pulled down her tray table. Ms. Farrell put a linen cloth down and then Amy’s meal and her utensils, saying, “We don’t usually lose customers to the back of the plane.” She did the same with Sheridan’s steak. It was crazy being served this way in coach. The people nearby stared openly. Before returning to the front of the plane, Ms. Farrell smiled and said, “Enjoy your meals.”
Sheridan cut his meat into pieces and then did the same with his vegetables, green beans mixed with chopped nuts of some kind. Not almonds. Peanuts, maybe. He alternated eating the meat and the green beans without coming up for air. Amy couldn’t understand how he could have an appetite. She couldn’t touch her food. “Why are people after me? What’s the big secret?”
Sheridan seemed to realize he had more green beans than steak. So he stabbed several beans with his fork and added them to the mouthful he was already working on. He caught her disapproving look. “Hey, I didn’t have breakfast.” He made a big show of daintily patting his mouth with his napkin. If he’d chewed before swallowing, Amy had missed it. “I don’t know who they are. This is the Brits’ operation. They call us in like this when a plane’s gonna land in the States. All my bosses told me is not to let you get killed today. And I don’t know what’s in the book. You’re the one who’s reading it. You tell me.”
“It’s some kind of memoir from the nineteen thirties. Who’d get so worked up over something that happened seventy years ago?”
He’d almost brought the last forkful of meat and beans to his mouth. He held it there as he said, “I don’t know. But people still get worked up over stuff that went on two thousand years ago, don’t they?”
He started in on the new potatoes. Pop, pop, pop into his mouth, one after another. Amy couldn’t stand his being so calm. “So what am I supposed to do now?”
“We’ve got three more hours before we land in New York. Why don’t you just sit there and read and then let me in on it. I’m going with those opera favorites.” He took the headphones out of their plastic bag, plugged in, and hit a few buttons on the remote. Then he leaned back in his seat. Conversation over.
Now that it was Sheridan and not Kaltenbrunner next to her, the shakes were gone. Okay, Amy decided, back to Mr. Fleming.
Chapter 23
PROVENANCE
The plan went well at first. I was airlifted to the Aegean Islands and dropped down on Rhodes the morning of the Prince’s arrival like some deus ex machina. Unlike the Greek gods’, my machine was Lord Hawksley’s private aircraft, and I shared the flight with a thousand pounds of provisions intended for Hawksley’s villa.
In the afternoon, feeling every bit like a sack of potatoes—or, more to the point, a side of beef—I played my little stranded tourist scene for Wallis’s aunt, Mrs. Merryman, on the rocky plage in front of the Excelsior. She in turn reproduced my story for Wallis and the Prince, importuning him to take pity on one of his subjects. I affected a forlorn expression while Wallis stood slightly behind the Prince, hands on hips and smiling at me conspiratorially. His rented yacht, the Nahlin, slept thirty, and as there were only a dozen or so in their party, he was gracious enough to take me in. And give me my own cabin in the bargain.
The next morning I awoke early and wandered about the boat. I discovered the books in the library had been replaced with crates of golf balls. Later, while the Prince and the Earl of Sefton practised their drives into the Mediterranean, Wallis found me and informed me she would be developing a “headache” that would keep her from joining Edward and his party on an archaeological tour of the island. I was to have previously established that I had business papers I needed to go over in my cabin.
I heard the launch putter away from the yacht, followed at a decent interval by a soft knock on the door. The first thing Wallis said was “Can you be discreet?”
I said, “Madame, I am the soul of discretion,” which, since you’re reading this, I obviously am not.
She made a business of closing the little curtains over the portholes and sat down on the edge of the bed. “So what’s the real story?”
I took the plunge. “I wanted to see you again.”
She laughed. “Okay, you’ve seen me.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. “I wanted to have you again.”
She put her hand on me, drawing me down beside her. “I knew I liked you.”
Nothing I had done before had prepared me for prem
editated sex with Wallis Simpson. In 1935, I was twenty-six years old, in my prime, so to speak. I had been intimate (such an Edwardian phrase) with thirty to forty women. Girls, mostly. Usually I had been—or had been given the illusion of being—in charge. Wallis was in her fortieth year, and she was most definitely in charge. Hardly a beauty, she was flat and slim, with nothing to hold on to. But she was as sure of her sexual attractiveness as any Garbo or Lamarr.
I was then, and still am now, in awe of her vaginal muscles. She had what you might call fine motor skills and could work her various muscle groups the way Toscanini could work an orchestra. For another thing, she was as agile as an eel and had no fear of appearing unladylike in one of her two-person “arrangements.” She never turned the lights down or closed her eyes. She was always terrifyingly there.
Over the next few days, we had two more rendezvous before I was obliged to take my leave to return to my “business.” But I had laid the groundwork, so to speak, for a continuing relationship when Mrs. Simpson returned to Bryanston Court.
And what of Mr. Simpson in all this? By 1935, Ernest was no longer included when his wife was invited to the Prince’s place at Fort Belvedere. And certainly not on their Mediterranean cruise. At first, he had been honoured that the future King had taken an interest in his wife. Then, when friendship had turned to passion, he had become jealous. And now, he seemed resigned to losing her.
In a way, her dalliance with the Prince made my time spent with Wallis easier to account for. Ernest was already accustomed to turning a blind eye to his wife’s comings and goings. It was really the Prince and the Special Branch security detail assigned to him that I had to dodge. So I was given an extra ace up my sleeve. O’Brien-ffrench had enlisted a sympathetic London motor car dealer, one Guy Marcus Trundle, to provide me with a safe house five minutes away from Bryanston Court. All I had to do after “visiting” with Wallis was to affix my hat on my head, turn up my coat collar, and stroll over to Trundle’s home. I’d unlock his door with the spare latchkey I’d been given, saunter through the place (waving to him if he was home), and leave through the back door and the gate at the end of the garden. If anyone was watching—and several pairs of eyes were—they’d think I was Trundle. I thought I had the thing knocked.
Chapter 24
PROVENANCE
The death of George V changed everything. As 1935 became 1936, Britain’s Depression deepened. Men were in the streets: a million unemployed had marched in December. Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists were in the streets now, urging the new king to back Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. (Of course, Mosley was on Il Duce’s payroll.) In March, the Germans would walk into the Rhineland, breaking the Locarno Pact and the Treaty of Versailles once and for all. France, with a quarter million men under arms, waited for British support, which never came. The new King echoed Lord Lothian’s summing-up of the Wehrmacht’s march into Köln: “The Germans are just going into their own back garden.”
The caterpillar that had been David, the Prince of Wales, had spread its wings and become King Edward VIII. But was he a monarch butterfly or a moth? Six months into his reign, Edward seemed ready to give the whole shop away to Hitler. Turning a blind eye to the geared-up war machine that sent Stuka bombers over Valencia, he again praised Nazi economic progress as a “miracle”—this time at the annual reunion of the British Legion—and he even sent a congratulatory note to both dictators on the formation of the Rome-Berlin “Axis.” Just before the old King’s death, I was personally close enough to overhear George V speak the famous line about his son to the new PM, Stanley Baldwin. “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.” Edward managed it in ten.
And what about Wallis? Notwithstanding his mother’s pledge to never accept or even speak to Mrs. Simpson—“the woman is unsuitable as a friend, disreputable as a mistress, and unthinkable as the Queen of England”—the King made Wallis his constant companion. Dinner parties at the homes of the ladies Colefax and Cunard; skiing (of both the snow and water sort) and cruising the Mediterranean. I happened to attend a “musicale” one evening at Emerald Cunard’s place at 7 Grosvenor Square. This was one of the last evenings when Ernest would be invited to attend along with his wife. We were having coffees when the King decided it was time to leave. He bade good-bye to his hostess and, at the door, stood staring at Wallis as his car was brought round. She unceremoniously got up and left with the King. It fell to me to bundle her teary-eyed husband into a cab alone. By the summer, Ernest had decamped from Bryanston Court to his club, and in October, Wallis filed for divorce.
Even so, the situation could still be retrieved. Edward’s investiture and coronation, the ceremony at which the thousand-year-old crown first worn by Edward the Confessor was to be placed upon his head at Westminster Abbey, by tradition was not scheduled to happen until after Saint George’s Day, in May of 1937. Until then he was “un roi sans couronne.” The trap, if there were a trap, had to be sprung now.
Winston, a fervent supporter of the monarchy and the Empire, supported the King publicly at every turn. But privately he sent Bruce Lockhart and O’Brien-ffrench round to my flat with a carrot and a stick. I was to tell Wallis that if she managed the King’s departure before the crown was placed upon his head, she would receive an income for life equal to what she would have been given as Queen, to be raised equally by Churchill’s friends in England and members of the Room, Roosevelt’s patrician circle in New York. And this sum was to be settled on her whether she eventually married Edward or not.
The stick actually was to be wielded by the PM, Stanley Baldwin, who had been brought into the plan by his Foreign Secretary and Winston’s good friend, Anthony Eden. It seems Winston had manoeuvred the King into allowing Baldwin to poll the major Dominion countries—India, Canada, South Africa, Australia—on their willingness to accept a Queen Wallis the First. My godfather’s thinking was that the smart set in London might countenance a divorced woman as Queen. But he was counting on Ottawa and Canberra to vote a resounding no.
The stick had an extra little barb: Baldwin had in his possession the China dossier compiled by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, describing in vivid detail Wallis’s escapades abroad in the 1920s. I was to present both the carrot and the stick to Mrs. Simpson as if I were bringing her a confidence from “friends of friends.” And to let her know the dossier would be given to the King, and if need be, the press, should she not prove complaisant.
It was two days before she was to be granted her preliminary decree nisi from Ernest. I had let myself in the servants’ entrance and we were sitting in the back parlour when I described the situation and made her the offer. When I had finished, she simply withdrew her hand from mine and looked at me for a long moment. More like three long moments. Her look was the one Caesar probably gave to Brutus. And then she said no so quickly, I spilled my sherry on the Axminster. It could have been worse; it could have been the amontillado.
“But Wallis, why? The Dominions are against you, there’s the dossier…and think of all that money.” Was any barrister ever more succinct in his summing-up?
She shook her head so vociferously, I could see the diamond hairclip in her bun with every defiant shake. “Because then she’ll be Queen.”
“Who, Mary?” I thought she meant the dowager Queen.
Wallis lit one of her American cigarettes. “Of course not. I mean Cookie. The Dowdy Duchess.”
Came the dawn. Cookie, née Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was married to Edward’s brother, Albert, the Duke of York. She was the woman Wallis loved to hate. She had also been the woman Wallis loved to imitate, until the Duchess had caught her at it one Sunday morning at Fort Belvedere. “If Edward isn’t King, it’s Bertie and Cookie.” Wallis always called him by the old King’s pet name. “Makes a girl want to fwow up just thinking about it. No, I simply can’t.”
That’s how things stood for a fortnight, until I received assistance from an unexpected source. On November 1, the Sunday
before the American election, Wallis’s Aunt Bessie was invited out of the clear blue by Vincent Astor to join him for a day of sailing around the Chesapeake on his steam yacht, the Nourmahal. In itself, this would have been most unusual, as the Astors were Hudson River and not Chesapeake gentry. More unusual still was the identity of the yacht’s third passenger that afternoon. Aunt Bessie realized later that she should have guessed it the moment she saw a wicker wheelchair coming aboard with the baggage. In the varnished wood and white saloon, Astor introduced her to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I have it on good authority the negotiations were as cutthroat as any FDR had had with John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. Aunt Bessie had raised Wallis, had unfailingly reminded her that “I sacrificed my own welfare” for her (as she so melodramatically—and untruthfully—put it now to the President), and was bound and determined to cash in. Roosevelt appealed to Mrs. Merryman’s patriotism. Mrs. Merryman appealed to Mr. Roosevelt’s wallet. In the end, Aunt Bessie was cut in for a third on top of whatever Wallis would get. All she had to do was convince her niece to exert her own immense gravitational pull on the King. The aunt could console herself with the thought that the object wasn’t to remove Wallis from the King. It was to remove the King from the throne.
From now on, Aunt Bessie would be Wallis’s “American controller,” a title FDR invented for her on the spot. And until the old woman’s death after the war, the deal included Wallis’s reporting back everything she saw or heard Edward do. Would the Woman Who Would Be Queen go for it?
Rather than just hope for the best, we English decided to help things along. Beginning the day after Aunt Bessie’s excursion, Wallis received a delivery of seventeen red roses from the best florist in Mayfair. The card was signed “Always” in English, but in an obviously German hand. These deliveries, always seventeen roses and always “Always” but no signature, continued for the next several weeks. One time, the standing order for the roses was “mistakenly” included in the delivery. It suggested the secret admirer’s initials were JvR. Naturally the servants removed the florist’s paperwork from the arrangement when it was given to Wallis, but they had seen it as they were meant to. Their story, when it got around, was that Mrs. Simpson must have had a fling with Joachim von Ribbentrop, an affair to remember. Always. The story was denied, of course, by Ribbentrop. But it supported the malign rumour that Wallis was privy to the secret papers the King left lying around Fort Belvedere, and that she was ready, willing, and able to pass such sensitive information on to her friends the Germans. It would make the prospect of a Queen Wallis I that much more distasteful.